Relation between acute and late irradiation impairment of four basic tastes and irradiated tongue volume in patients with head-and-neck cancer.

PURPOSE: Taste loss is a major cause of morbidity in patients undergoing head-and-neck irradiation. The relationship between the time course and the degree of taste disorder was studied in both acute and late phases.

METHODS AND MATERIALS: Taste ability was measured by the taste threshold for the four basic tastes using a filter paper disc method in patients before, during, and after radiotherapy. The subjects were divided into two groups. In Group A, the radiation fields included most of the tongue (n = 100), and in Group B the radiation fields did not include the tip of the tongue (n = 18).

RESULTS

In Group A, there was a significant impairment of the threshold of all four basic tastes at 3 weeks after starting radiotherapy (RT), and this impairment remained at 8 weeks (p < 0.05). This was not seen in Group B. In Group A, there was no significant difference in the patterns of taste sensitivity change between the high-dose (>20 Gy) and low-dose (< or =20 Gy) groups. In the late phase, recovery of taste loss was seen in both groups since 4 months after completing RT.

CONCLUSIONS

Unless the anterior part of the tongue was irradiated, taste loss was not observed during RT. When the anterior part of the tongue was irradiated, a difference by radiation dose was not observed in the taste loss pattern. Additionally, radiation-induced taste dysfunction appears to be a temporal effect.